Case 09

Supplier Comparison in Purchasing

Every offer arrives in a different format. Comparison starts once they all look alike.

Today

Procurement merges supplier offers from PDFs, spreadsheets and specifications and compares prices, quantities, lead times and terms.

Who does the work

Today6 of 6 with a human

With workflow1 of 6 with a human

01Extraction
02Normalization
03Requirements matching
04Commercial comparison
05Risk and exception detection
06Review by procurement

One mark: one work step, in workflow order. Today a person handles each of them.

What it is measured by

Comparison time
Price deviations
Missed commercial terms

The workflow

Comes in
Supplier offers in PDF and Excel
AI understands
All offers in one schema
- Extraction from unstructured documents
- Normalization
- Comparison with the requirements
Software checks
Prices, quantities, lead times
- Minimum order quantities
- Contract rules
Lands with a human
A comparison ready for a decision
- The purchasing decision

AI structures the comparison. The purchasing decision stays with the human.

Case 01
Data capture from approved documents
Models propose, code decides. Code reads what it can read reliably. AI fills in the rest. The human reviews instead of typing.
Case 02
Articles from Researched Sources
Not every draft has to succeed. Only what passes the review gets published. AI writes. Rules decide what moves on. Humans set the rules.
Case 03
Social Media Posts for Every Article
Nobody writes posts anymore. A human decides what a post may do. AI picks and writes. Code checks and posts. A human sets the rules.
Case 04
Inquiries Captured in Conversation
A form asks what it knows. A workflow rarely fits into the first sentence. The agent asks. Software checks the brief. Only what a human approves is sent.
Case 05
Invoice and Purchase Order Verification
The standard case is rarely the problem. The effort comes from the deviations. Automate the standard. Give humans the exceptions.
Case 06
Quote Preparation from Customer Inquiries
The information for a quote already exists. It is just scattered. AI prepares the quote. The expert makes the decision.
Case 07
Technical Document and Compliance Review
The review takes expertise. Finding the evidence does not. AI prepares the compliance review. The decision stays with the responsible human.
Case 08
Customer Support → Engineering
The bottleneck is not the technical analysis, but the missing context. Engineering gets the relevant context before the actual analysis begins.
Case 10
Contract and Order Review
The goal is not to approve contracts automatically, but to find deviations reliably. AI finds, structures, compares and escalates. Humans decide and take responsibility.
Case 11
Master Data Cleansing and Entity Resolution
One company, three spellings, two IDs. An exact match will not find it. AI finds candidates. Rules limit the matching. Humans decide when in doubt. Only then does the system write.